Shooting Victoria (35 page)

The paper to which she referred contained the notes of the speech that the Lord Chancellor, Lord Lyndhurst, planned to give at the House of Lords about the current state of the insanity defense. Lyndhurst proposed convening the judges of the Supreme Court of Judicature in order to codify and promulgate a clear rule to apply in insanity cases—and stated that in his mind, the grounds for an insanity acquittal were clear: no one was criminally liable of a crime when he “is under the influence of delusion and insanity, so as not to know right from wrong, so as not to know what he is doing.” In wishing that Parliament lay down this rule, she obviously did not realize that her notion of criminal liability did not quite dovetail with Lyndhurst's. Victoria considered simple awareness of the act enough for guilt; Lyndhurst considered
moral
awareness the standard.

The Lords met the next day and submitted five questions to the Law Lords—the key one being the second: “What are the proper questions to be submitted to the jury when a person, alleged to be afflicted with insane delusion respecting one or more particular subjects or persons, is charged with the commission of a crime … and insanity is set up as a defence?” Eleven of the twelve judges agreed upon their response, as set out six weeks later by Chief Justice Tindal (who had of course presided over the McNaughtan trial). That response became the McNaughtan Rules, which set the standard for the insanity defense in courtrooms across five continents. In Tindal's words, “to establish a defence on the ground of insanity, it must be clearly proved, that, at the time of committing of the act, the party accused was labouring under such a defect of reason, from disease of the mind, as not to know the nature and quality of the act he was doing, or if he did know it, that he did not know he was doing what was wrong.”

Tindal's standard did not repudiate the precedent of McNaughtan's trial—but it did not wholly vindicate it, either. McNaughtan's inability to understand the wrongness of his action had indeed been a part of his defense—but moral awareness was a minor matter compared to the aspect of his insanity that every one of the medical witnesses had agreed upon—the fact that he was compelled to kill by an urge he had no control over. This notion of “irresistible impulse,” as it was generally called, had no part in the McNaughtan Rules. The Rules were thus controversial at the moment of their birth, and have generated a great deal of controversy—in England, the United States, Australia, and elsewhere—ever since.

The Rules, moreover, were not what Victoria desired—though it would take some time before she realized it. Her letter to Peel made it clear exactly what she wanted in a verdict against
anyone
who deliberately raised a hand against herself or her servants: sane or insane, that person was guilty. Whether Oxford and McNaughtan would have been found guilty under the McNaughtan Rules is an open question. The assaults upon the Queen to come would raise the question again and again, and in the end, Victoria would find the insanity acquittal wanting. And she would accordingly change it.

Deep in the archives of the Museum of London is perhaps the oddest fashion accessory a British monarch ever owned: a delicate-looking parasol in the style of the early 1840s, of emerald-green silk, with a satin weave pattern at the fringe, and a carved ivory handle and ferrule. Discreetly hidden between layers of silk is a lining of close-linked chain mail.

This curious protection was designed in 1842, likely at the behest of Albert, to protect the Queen from the miscreants plaguing her. As far as ensuring Victoria's comfort during her regular airings, however, the chain-mail parasol could hardly have done the trick: at three and a quarter pounds, it weighs more than a large hammer, and holding it up for the length of an outing would have taken the strength of an Olympian. Much more likely, this chain-mail
parasol was custom-made for the unusual occasion when the Queen
expected
to encounter an assailant during her ride, as she did when John Francis made his second attempt. The manufacture of this parasol almost certainly followed hard upon that event. This gift, if it was indeed Albert's gift, was his material counterpart to Peel's legal gift to Victoria: the Security of the Queen's Person Act.

Victoria is never known to have put the parasol to use. Certainly after Francis she never again flushed out an assailant. Indeed, for a time after Bean the assaults ceased altogether—apparent evidence that the prospect of a shameful public whipping actually stopped would-be Oxfords from confronting Victoria. Seven years would pass before the next assailant struck. And by then, Victoria's delicate-looking green chain-mail parasol was no longer in fashion.

*
The same James Partridge who had put Oxford in a cell and had arrested Charles Dassett after Bean's attempt.

Part Three

EXHIBITIONS

fourteen

B
IRTHDAY

T
he fine weather suited Victoria's spirits and the nation's on this day, 19 May 1849, the official day of celebration of her thirtieth birthday. She had celebrated a dozen birthdays as Queen, and over the years the ceremonies of the day were established: just about all that occurred on this day she had seen and done before. The day began with the pealing of church bells across London, and a ubiquitous raising of the royal standard. In the morning, across the three Kingdoms were military reviews, and first among these was the review of the Household troops on the Horse Guards Parade outside Whitehall, conducted not by Victoria but by Albert, accompanied as he usually was by the Commander-in-Chief of the army, the eighty-year-old Duke of Wellington. Observing the spectacle for the first time was the seven-year-old Prince of Wales, from the prime viewpoint of the back garden of 10 Downing Street, then the residence of Victoria's Prime Minister, Lord John Russell.

At one o'clock the artillery in the park and at the Tower of London boomed a salute that was answered by volleys from Woolwich and from military depots across the United Kingdom. An hour later, Victoria and Albert rode in state to St. James to accept the congratulations of the uppermost 1,700 at the traditional birthday drawing room. The royal couple were resplendently dressed—Albert in his field marshal's uniform, encrusted with the heavily jeweled insignia of the Garter, the Bath, St. Patrick's, the Thistle, and the Golden Fleece; Victoria in “the most beautiful dress at the drawing-room”: white satin and a train of green and silver silk, trimmed all over with red roses and violets, with a matching headdress of flowers, diamonds, and feathers. The dress, of course, had been woven in Spitalfields; the Queen required dresses of British manufacture at all her drawing rooms. The royal couple had returned from the drawing room, and now prepared for an outing: an impromptu carriage ride among the many who were milling about Green, Hyde, and Regent's Parks on this holiday.

In the evening, her chief ministers and her household officers would toast her at the full-dress dinners they held in her honor, while the rest of London, it seemed, crowded into the West End in slowly snaking queues to ooh and aah at the elaborate illuminations on the façades of the ministerial residences, the clubs on Pall Mall, and the establishments of the Queen's tradesmen: brilliant, variegated gaslight displays of crowns, stars, mottoes, laurel wreaths, English roses and British lions, portraits of the Queen—and a thousand blinding permutations of VR.

None of it was new to her. But this year, more than any other, the cheers, the well-wishing, the
feux de joie
and toasts, the bows and curtsies, must have seemed more appropriate to her than ever before. Life simply was different this year—different than it had been just a year before, or during any of the years of this difficult decade—years of poverty and hunger, class conflict and outright rebellion.

Much had changed as the decade progressed, but for Victoria, there was one constant: Albert. And Victoria had developed one
belief, the anchor of all her thinking: Albert's perfection in all things. Since the fall of Melbourne and the departure of Lehzen, Albert had been her sole confidant and her private secretary, reading, summarizing, drafting replies to all her official correspondence, and tirelessly composing memoranda on issues he deemed important.
His
ideas became hers. “It is you who have entirely formed me,” she once told him. They met with her ministers together, and spoke as one. When the Whigs returned to political office in 1846, they were amazed at the change since the days of Melbourne: “The Prince is become so identified with the Queen, that they are one person,” wrote Charles Greville. “He is King to all intents and purposes.”

While never forgetting Victoria was the monarch, and while always subsuming his own interests to hers, Albert embraced the role of a co-ruler, occupying his own throne at openings and closings of Parliament or at the Royal Balls; when the Queen was indisposed—as she was because of pregnancy nine times during the first seventeen years of their marriage—he took her place at government meetings and public functions. Victoria's Hanoverian relatives carped bitterly at his elevation, especially during the early years of their marriage. When Princess Alice was born in 1843 and Albert stood in for his wife at a court levée, the Cambridges absented themselves from the Court in a huff. A month after this, the King of Hanover battled with Albert physically for precedence at Victoria's cousin's wedding. Hanover lost: “I was forced to give him a strong push and drive him down a few steps, where the First Master of Ceremonies led him out of the chapel,” Albert wrote his brother. Victoria was livid at any sign of others' blindness to what were in her mind Albert's transcendent merits. Time was on Albert's side in this respect: the original public image of Albert as a penniless foreign interloper had largely shifted to one of selfless public servant—and respectable
paterfamilias
.

Albert repaid Victoria's complete trust in him by giving her the best years of her life. He had convinced her that her true fulfillment
was never to be found in the social whirl she had so delighted in during the Melbourne days, and those days were long gone: just a week after Lehzen had left the palace forever, in 1842, Victoria looked upon that time as if it were a strange dream from which she had awoken: “The life I led then was so artificial and superficial and yet I thought I was happy. Thank God! I now know what real happiness means.” Albert never overcame his sense of foreignness, and was resistant to the charms of society—notoriously, almost comically resistant in particular to the charms of society women. He—and, before long, Victoria—found pleasure in escaping the aristocratic sparkle of Court life for the bourgeois
gemütlichkeit
of secluded family life. And over the past few years, he had labored mightily to create that life for his wife and their children.

He gave Victoria babies, for one thing. In 1849, there were six: after Vicky and Bertie came Alice (April 1843), and then Alfred (“Affie,” August 1844), Helena (“Lenchen,” May 1846) and Louise (March 1848) born just as Europe was erupting into revolution. Albert was a naturally loving and doting father—supervising the royal nursery, to which he kept the keys and constantly checked the locks—concerned, especially in the early days, by intrusions such as the Boy Jones's, and by a number of letters received threatening harm to the royal infants. The Queen was more ambivalent about children: she disliked the discomforts of pregnancy and feared the pains of childbirth, thought infants unpleasantly “frog-like,” and confessed that she “only very exceptionally” found conversation with her children “either agreeable or easy.” None the less, Victoria learned to find her greatest fulfillment among her family. “I am coming more and more convinced,” she would later declare, “that the only true happiness in this world is to be found in the domestic circle.” Of course Albert, who always took precedence over her children in her affections, was absolutely necessary to complete that happiness.

Albert's reform of the royal households and his management of the royal estates made his wife rich, and made possible the domestic
cocoon he created for her. Once he wrested the management of the royal household from Lehzen, he set to work and replaced the bureaucratic anarchy of the three competing household departments by appointing a single master of the household in each royal residence. Fires were lit without confusion, windows were washed, guests were well attended to—and costs went down. More than this, he took control of the royal estates, and they soon began to pay handsomely. In short order he made the monarchy profitable, removing it forever from the chronic indebtedness that had plagued the Queen's royal uncles.

As the family grew, they spent far less time in London, finding seclusion at first at Windsor and Claremont. (The other royal residence, Brighton, set amid the bustle of the city and away from the ocean, they both disliked; they shut the place up and sold it in 1845, using the money to enlarge Buckingham Palace.) By 1843, they wanted even more seclusion—a residence bought with their own funds, and thus free of government administration. By October they had negotiated the purchase of a thousand-acre estate, Osborne House, on the Isle of Wight. And a little over a year before this birthday—at the end of 1847—they solidified their mutual love for the Highlands by leasing “a pretty little Castle in the old Scotch style”: Balmoral. No English monarch before Victoria had ever resided so distantly from the capital before this: such a thing would not have been possible before the 1840s and two great technological developments of the decade. Railways were booming and interconnecting the nation, reducing in particular travel time from London to Osborne House (with the help of a steam-powered yacht) to three hours, and to Aberdeen to less than nine. And the telegraph, which had entered into nationwide operation by the end of the decade, gave the Queen the ability to conduct government business from virtually anywhere in the Kingdom.